Today was the first time I tried to customise this blog. In the past, when I’ve crafted my blogs using raw HTML and CSS templates, I generally went for a fairly minimalist look which took the reader from loading to content as quickly as possible. And this is my main issue with the vast majority of the WordPress themes: they just use too much screen real estate with invariant fluff.

Here’s a graphical illustration of what I mean:

I guess this is focused very much on the first impression. The very first time that you load a page, maybe some beautiful pictures or graphics at the top impress you. But if those pictures take up half the screen, and you then become a repeat visitor to the site, then that’s half a page of scrolling every single time, or even for every single page you visit on the site.

Inflicting this on visitors is not user friendly.

For now, I’ve defaulted to a more minimalist design and added a bit of custom CSS to shrink the title at the top to a slightly more manageable size. There’s still a bit more wasted space than I would like, but I guess this is OK until/unless I find a better theme.